“Just What a Young Man Ought to Be”:
The 2005 Pride & Prejudice and
Transitional Ideas of Gentility

Ann M. Tandy

Ann M. Tandy (email: tandy004@umn.edu) teaches British Literature
at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. She has previously
co-edited an annotated bibliography of David
Copperfield and published on techniques for teaching racist and sexist
texts. She is currently working on the late-Victorian cremation movement
and fears of live burial.

Austen is often hailed
as the master of drawing-room realism; the symbolic power of her physical
settings offers a range of readings, from comparing inside and outside conversations
to tracking characters’ physical movements in conjunction with their psychological
and emotional development. Physical setting has been a particular focus
of various adaptations; the special-edition DVD release of the 1995 A&E Pride and Prejudice includes a “making
of” book that spends a substantial chapter discussing the challenges of finding
just the right locations for the key settings of the story, from the grandest
of parks and exteriors to the detailed, domestic interiors. But setting
of course includes not only place but also time, and this aspect of setting has
been largely taken for granted in Austen scholarship and adaptations. Recent
cinematic productions of Austen’s novels (barring, of course, such radical
revisions as Amy Heckerling’s Clueless)
have invariably set them firmly in their Regency dates of publication through
both dress and interior design. The A&E “making of” book includes
costume notes referencing 1813 fashions for men and women. The 2005 Focus
Films Pride & Prejudice, directed
by Joe Wright, diverges from this pattern, setting the novel instead in 1797, when
Austen wrote “First Impressions,” an
early version of Pride and Prejudice;
thus we see in this production a generational shift, with the younger (and more
fashionable) characters reflecting a sort of proto-Regency style of hair and
dress, and the older generations still dressing to an earlier, mid-
eighteenth-century mode.

This setting of the film
in an earlier time provides, I argue, an alternate way of understanding the
tensions in the story among Miss Bingley, Elizabeth and Jane, between Lady
Catherine and Elizabeth, and most importantly between the haughty Mr. Darcy and
the family of the woman he is coming to love. In adaptations and readings
of the novel, this tension has typically been understood as resulting from
differences between the cosmopolitan world of the Darcys (and, more recently,
the Bingleys) and the provincial world of the Bennets and their smaller, less
refined country estate. “You’ll find the society something savage,” Mr.
Darcy warns Mr. Bingley at the beginning of the 1995 production when Mr.
Bingley is expressing his delight at Netherfield and the surrounding
community. “Country manners?” Bingley replies; “I think they’re charming.”
Mr. Darcy’s remark echoes Miss Bingley in the novel itself, when she describes
Elizabeth (to Mr. Darcy) as having “‘an abominable sort of conceited
independence, a most country town
indifference to decorum’” (36, emphasis added). But by presenting the
story in the context of a generational shift, the 2005 production enables us
additionallyto understand this
tension as a generational one, hinging particularly on shifting definitions of
gentility and expectations about how members of different social classes should
interact. Thus the 2005 production makes possible a compelling expansion
of our understanding of the novel itself.

Deborah Moggach’s
screenplay for the 2005 production uses the language of the novel sparingly,
but the film’s visual elements suggest a reading of the novel related to its
genesis in the 1790s. The producers and designers of the 2005 production
very specifically chose to set the movie in an earlier time frame, but this decision
was not an attempt at a revisionist interpretation. According to the movie’s
official website, Wright’s decision to set the film in 1797 was a result of his
dislike of Regency-style dresses, particularly of the empire waistline, which
he found “very ugly” (“About the Production”). This aesthetic choice led
costume designer Jacqueline Durran to work with a very different range of
clothing for the women; Caroline Bingley “would obviously be wearing the latest
creation. But Mrs. Bennet’s dresses are earlier than 1797, and Lady
Catherine’s are even earlier, because those two would have best clothes from
previous years in their wardrobe” (“About the Production”). Dame Judi
Dench’s Lady Catherine in particular appears always ready for an appearance at
court, dressing for her daily life in fashions that by the turn of the century
had become relegated to highly ritualized, formal moments of social
display. Thus Durran’s costuming creates striking visual contrasts in the
movie, both between generations and between Meryton’s permanent residents and
the newcomers.

We first notice this
contrast in the Meryton ball scene, with most of the local women (particularly
of Mrs. Bennet’s generation) in the tightly laced bodices of eighteenth-century
fashion, decorated with gauzy scarves at the neckline. At the Netherfield
ball, hosted by Mr. Bingley and his highly fashionable sister Caroline, three
women stand out in proto-Regency dresses with slightly elevated waistlines:
Jane, Elizabeth, and of course Caroline herself, with the most extreme of the
dresses. A similar aesthetic drove set design; production designer Sarah
Greenwood went for a sort of “late-eighteenth-century ‘shabby chic’” (“Behind
the Scenes”). On the whole, critics responded favorably to this sort of
grubby realism in contrast to the relatively polished surface of other
adaptations. But in addition to its perhaps greater realism in depicting
the grittiness of English country-house life, this emphasis on aesthetic
transitions rather than Regency innovations provides a visual construct of the
more fundamental transitions taking place in ideas about the nature of the
people living in those houses and wearing those clothes. Most explicitly,
this transition can be seen in the eighteenth-century idea of the gentleman.

Austen’s heroines
typically negotiate attractions to and attentions from a number of men who fit
the label “gentleman.” Emma Woodhouse is surrounded by the clergyman Mr.
Elton, the fashionable young man Frank Churchill, and the established landowner
Mr. Knightley; Anne Elliot feels pulled between William Elliot, the heir to a
baronetcy, and Captain Wentworth, the newly wealthy naval officer. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen not only
explores the social variables of the term “gentleman,” as implied in the
characters just mentioned, but also examines how the term itself was evolving
morally throughout the eighteenth century. The variability and evolution
of the gentleman hinges on the convergence of the public and the personal in
the eighteenth-century sense of self; thus the tensions of the Elizabeth-Darcy
relationship are, as Samuel Kliger points out, precisely those of “humans qua humans” versus “humans as the ‘art’
of society directs their activities” (53), a central eighteenth-century dilemma.
In her depiction of various gentlemen, therefore, Austen participates in this
ongoing eighteenth-century debate about the relationship between morals and
manners. The term “gentleman” became during this time an increasingly
useful but also fraught term, both philosophically and socio-economically.

The eighteenth-century
reformist idea of the gentleman, spearheaded by Defoe, Addison and Steele and
fictionalized by Samuel Richardson, was according to Robin Gilmour a gentried
reaction against an aristocratic concept that was increasingly seen as devoid
of any moral sincerity whatsoever (4-5). If Richardson’s amoral
aristocratic rake Lovelace in Clarissa
could still be considered a gentleman by polite society, then there was
something fundamentally wrong with the term. In his 1729 The Compleat English Gentleman, Daniel
Defoe exhorts the aristocratic gentleman to “stoop so low as to admit that vertue,
learning, a liberal education, a degree of natural acquir’d knowledge are
necessary to finish the born gentleman” and argues further that only birth and
exemplary character together can “produce the best and most glorious piece of
God’s creation, a compleat gentleman” (qtd. inLetwin 13). The debate over the term reflects an awareness
that the characteristics Defoe promotes can be a mere pretense, and it also
indicates anxiety over social mobility: on the one hand, one increases
one’s chances of climbing the social ladder by ingratiating oneself to and
imitating those above; on the other hand, that these characteristics can so
easily be learned and imitated suggests that such genteel behavior is a
pretense potentially lacking any real foundation in private life. Those
in (and ambitious to join) the eighteenth-century fashionable world were very
conscious of that world as a stage on which, however they might feel privately,
individuals performed carefully scripted roles, ranging from the interpersonal
importance of “urbanity, politeness, [and] a ‘pleasing address’” (Gilmour 19)
to the high public drama of presentation at court.

This difference between
public and private selves, between learned and innate behavior, was not
necessarily seen as problematic. Elizabeth compares Mr. Darcy’s
self-professed lack of ease in conversing with strangers with her own lack of
proficiency at the piano, and ironically it is Lady Catherine who suggests the
solution: “perhaps you should take your aunt’s advice,” Elizabeth tells him
in the 2005 production, “and practice.” The reforming view of the
gentleman, with its balance between social and moral qualities, thus offered
great opportunities to the ambiguously defined but increasingly powerful middle
classes of the eighteenth century. The ever greater economic power of
merchants and proto-industrialists created a greater fluidity of social class
than ever before seen, and out of necessity the attitudes from the top down
were growing grudgingly more favorable. The fashionable world’s
snobbishness towards trade was becoming less strict (Gilmour 23-24), a shift
that Austen dramatizes effectively in a number of ways; as Gilmour points out,
Elizabeth’s response in the novel to Lady Catherine’s admonition that she
shouldn’t aspire to a marriage above her station represents a powerful “middle-class
challenge to aristocracy” (31) and validates the “alliance between respectable
trade and responsible gentry” (32). “‘He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s
daughter; so far we are equal’” (356), says Elizabeth, to the loud cheers of
generations of readers.

In this “magnificent
retort” Austen voices what Reeta Sahney calls the “good eighteenth century Tory
doctrine” of class leveling; “it is the middle class Bennets and the Gardiners
who compel the noble Fitzwilliams and Darcys to take them seriously” (Sahney
75), not the other way around. Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, Elizabeth’s aunt
and uncle on her mother’s side who have a prosperous life in London founded on
trade, represent precisely Gilmour’s positive alliance between trade and
gentry, fixing what Mrs. Bennet nearly destroys by being the first of Elizabeth’s
family (other than Jane) whom Mr. Darcy can view with respect (Gilmour
32). “It was consoling,” Elizabeth finds in the novel, “that he should
know she had some relations for whom there was no need to blush. She
listened most attentively to all that passed between them, and gloried in every
expression, every sentence of her uncle, which marked his intelligence, his
taste, or his good manners” (255). But the snobbish attitude towards
trade lingers on in the new generation as embodied by Miss Bingley and Mrs.
Hurst, who, though allowing Jane to be “‘a very sweet girl,’” condemn her to an
unprosperous life because of those same connections (36). Their
snobbishness is both ironic and understandable, lacking as they do even the
modest pedigree of the Bennets and deriving their family fortune and subsequent
sense of entitlement from the trade of their predecessors. One wonders
how Lady Catherine might have responded to a rumor that her beloved nephew was
going to marry Miss Bingley.

Their brother, by
contrast, embodies almost perfectly the key Steelean concepts of the gentleman
from The Guardian in 1713, being
“modest without bashfulness, obliging and complaisant without servility,
cheerful and in good humor without noise” (qtd. inLetwin 17). Thus in the novel, Jane describes Mr. Bingley
after the first ball as “‘just what a young
man ought to be . . . sensible, good humoured, lively; and I never
saw such happy manners!—so much ease,
with such perfect good breeding!’” (14, emphasis added). In the 2005
production, Jane begins with the same description before the more vivacious
Elizabeth interrupts her. In both, it is worth noting that Jane says this
is just what a young man ought to be,
not what a gentleman ought to be;
these qualities have become the ideal for any respectable young man. Mr.
Bingley has no dissimulation. He is precisely what he appears to be and
is entirely at ease with others, whatever their social status. Mr.
Bingley’s universal agreeability, so key to the gentleman, may according to
Shirley Letwin strike some as a miraculous ability “to treat everyone as an
equal without disregarding differences of rank” (15). It is worth noting,
too, Jane’s celebration of his “happy manners,” for manners are not morals,
though clearly here she equates the two. Genteel manners, as the
unreformed eighteenth-century gentleman demonstrated, were simply behaviors
that could be emulated and manipulated when necessary for selfish, amoral ends
(Gilmour 16-18). And although Elizabeth acknowledges this potential
falsehood when she praises Jane’s caution to Charlotte (in commending her for
not showing too much feeling before they have confirmed whether Bingley’s
morals do indeed coincide with his happy manners [22]), she is quick to ignore
the same principle when presented with the equally happily-mannered Mr.
Wickham. Wickham has, as she eventually acknowledges to Jane, all of the
appearance of a gentleman without the substance, whereas Mr. Darcy has all the
substance but is lacking in the appearance (225). In the novel, the three
gentleman (for, indeed, according to the definitions of the time all three
merit the term in one way or another) thus demonstrate the problematics of this
term in a society “in flux; an acquisitive, high bourgeois society at the point
of its most evident inter-locking with an agrarian capitalism that is itself
mediated by inherited titles and by the making of family names” (Sahney 17).

In the 2005 production,
the characters of Mr. Bennet, Mr. Bingley, and Mr. Darcy portray the
eighteenth-century gentleman in various stages of reformation. Donald
Sutherland’s Mr. Bennet has, on the surface, more in common with Henry Fielding’s
Squire Western than with other adaptations of this character. His vocal
inflections do not change a bit, whether he is mumbling about a famous ancestor
of the current pig he is herding down the hallway or asking his wife for
clarification about Jane and Mr. Bingley. As horrified as Lady Catherine
would be to find herself mentioned in the same sentence, she and Mr. Bennet (and
Mrs. Bennet) are contemporaries. In this context, his failings as a
father can be seen not as a retreat from the daily tribulations of a silly wife
and daughters but as a failure to adapt to the new world and new modes of
genteel behavior. Simon Woods’s Mr. Bingley in the 2005 production is a
gentleman in transition, representing the new middle-class aspirations to
gentility based not on family history or land but on trade. Though still
portraying that universal agreeability that Austen celebrates, Simon Woods’s
Mr. Bingley displays a greater proximity to his humble roots and, in that
humility, an apparent awkwardness with his family’s new status that contrasts
sharply with his sister’s elevated sense of self-consequence. What
natural gentility Woods’s Bingley has allies him more with Fielding’s Tom Jones—though
he lacks Tom’s self-assurance and borders at times on diffidence in
conversation with Jane—than with more polished incarnations of Austen’s
character.

The greatest contrast to
Bingley’s easy humility is not Mr. Darcy but Dame Judi Dench’s Lady Catherine;
Mr. Bingley and Lady Catherine, then, represent the extremes between which Mr.
Darcy himself negotiates in the 2005 production. Lady Catherine’s utter
horror at the degradation of finding herself in the Bennet family home reflects
an earlier eighteenth-century attitude that aristocratic manners are wasted on
the lower orders; thus in the novel Mr. Darcy’s shame at “his aunt’s ill
breeding” in her treatment of Elizabeth (173) refers to manners which were, a
generation before, a sign of good breeding. And here, though I might
question the 2005 production’s historical accuracy in clothing so worldly and
wealthy a woman as Lady Catherine in outmoded fashions, her appearance
nevertheless has the effect of reifying her as the representative of an
attitude about social class that is fruitless and past its prime. By
contrast, Simon Woods’s Mr. Bingley is, if anything, more at home with the
class level from which the rest of his family is trying to elevate itself; his
sister Caroline, portrayed by Kelly Reilly, is clearly looking back to older
models like Lady Catherine for her clues to behavior rather than foreshadowing
manners to come.

If at the film’s beginning
Matthew Macfadyen’s Mr. Darcy clearly sees Mr. Bingley’s comfort with Meryton
society as problematic, he just as clearly, as the film progresses, grows
uncomfortable with his aunt’s outmoded ideas of gentility. We thus wait,
along with Elizabeth, to see if he can overcome the power of his upbringing and
embrace something of his friend’s affability. When he asks Elizabeth, at
the end, how he can “ever make amends for such behavior” as Lady Catherine has
exhibited towards her and her family, it is not difficult to interpret his
sense of shame as including his own rather similar behavior towards them in the
past. It thus becomes a crucial indication of just how far he has
distanced himself from the worldview of his aunt’s generation. We can now
read his description of his upbringing in the novel with fresh eyes,
understanding it as an explication of a generational shift as much as his
personal experience as a child:

“As a child I was taught
what was right, but I was not taught
to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow
them in pride and conceit. . . . [I] was spoilt by my parents,
who though good themselves, . . . allowed, encouraged, almost taught
me to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond my own family circle,
to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared
with my own.” (369)

The latter part of this declaration describes
nicely the eighteenth-century aristocratic notion of gentility, as encapsulated
by Lady Catherine. By the time he gives this assessment of himself in the
novel, he has been “‘properly humbled’” by Elizabeth (369), particularly by her
reproof that she might have felt guilt in rejecting him “‘had you behaved in a
more gentleman-like manner,’” a charge which causes him to physically “start”
when she says it (192), and which he forcibly recalls during their reconciliation
at the end of the novel: “‘you can scarcely conceive how [your words] have
tortured me’” (367). Mr. Darcy’s reformation has as much to do with a
fundamental reconception of what it means to be a gentleman as it has to do
with a personal re-evaluation of his pride and prejudices.

The best thing an
adaptation of a work of literature can do, regardless of our ultimate
assessment of its quality, is give us new ways to think about the original
material. Nowhere in any of the promotional materials for the 2005
production do any of the people involved discuss the ideas of gentility in
transition as I have examined them here; from all (limited) accounts, its
presence appears to be the accidental byproduct of Joe Wright’s preference for
a certain kind of waistline. Nevertheless, the rereading of Austen’s
novel that this movie encourages is truly fruitful, complicating and adding
depth to the central tension of the novel which has, by and large, gone so
unchallenged for so long as to have become its own kind of “truth”: Mr.
Darcy struggles against his love for Elizabeth because her family is not up to
his personal standards of taste and behavior. By being able to suggest
that his prejudice against them is not merely personal but also historically
bound, that he has been socially conditioned to view his rude treatment of them
as entirely appropriate, we can vastly expand our understanding of the process
he goes through in overcoming his objections. And thus, whereas the 2005
production (in its U. S. release) ends with an entirely personal moment
between the newly married (and apparently consummated) couple, the novel’s
ending with Mr. Darcy’s confirmed affection for the middle-class Gardiners (and
the acknowledgement of the role they played in Elizabeth and Darcy’s union)
seems less Austen’s maidenly refusal to peer too closely into personal
intimacies and more her ultimate affirmation that Mr. Darcy has not merely
taken a new bride but has become a new man, a new gentleman, representative of
an entirely different view of the world and the people around him.